Sorry if this has been discussed before, couldn't find a way to search for something similar. Also sorry for a not perfect English. My question is basically this: how do you guys differentiate between someone who cheated (i.e. used SAM to unlock all the achievements for a game) and someone who exploited an in-game glitch?I can bring at least two examples that happened to me in the last days, this is why I started wondering about this topic. Both can be summarised like this:- game has achievements for completing 1, 5, 10, 20, 50... N levels- game has also a glitch that lets the player move to the next level without actually completing the previous one- by opening the next level, game thinks the previous level has been completed so it counts it towards the achievements.- everything is done by just clicking the mouse or pressing keyboard buttons (no codes, no console commands, no external apps, no anything)So, for one game I just clicked a precise point of the game screen N times and I got all the achievements in less than a minute.For the other one, I just pressed a precise key N times and again I got all the achievements in less than a minute (can provide the names if interested)So my question: how can you guys tell I haven't used SAM?

PS. Slightly on-topic. If I play a game offline and get a number of achievements, they will only uploaded to the server as soon as I get online, right? So they will all have the same date and time. Again, how can you tell I haven't used SAM?

Thank you for answering my doubts! And keep up with the great work, this site is awesome.

Some people think that taking some screenshot of the game to show your progression is a proof that you actually completed it. I personally don't agree with that.

As for your answer, there is now many people in the community who play the games with achievements or keep track of the forums and know when those kinds of tricks exist in a game, so when people have this kind of timestamps only in this game, it is most likely because of the trick not SAM.

About offline play I am not sure but as far as I know, the achievements pop when you open the game when this game have included a function to resync the achievements at launch.

Practical example: I played Horror Hospital (appid: 576440) for 40 minutes. When I closed the game, I noticed I got 10 achievements (no popup ever showed up). They are all marked as gotten at the very same minute (10:56 AM) because that's when I closed the game. How do you guys manage to differentiate *this* from someone who uses SAM to unlock a dozen of achievements at once?

How do you guys manage to differentiate *this* from someone who uses SAM to unlock a dozen of achievements at once?

It's called common behavior. When that happens to you, it will also happen to the other 99.9% of users playing that game. There are patterns we look for, information we gather, we don't randomly mark profiles for having some clustered unlocks in some obscure game. We analyze this cases as they appear, document what we find on the internet, or from personal testings. It's not a perfect system by any means, mistakes can happen, which is why profile marks are not permanent (there's an appeal process you can take to have it unmarked, even giving second chances to cheaters, as long as they can clean their profiles).

Thanks for your reply. Sorry if my post(s) had an argumentative tone in them, it wasn't my intention (my English is not perfect, I apologize for that): I was just genuinely curious about that. Thank you again and keep it up with the great work!